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Billionaires Build

paulgraham.com

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Re: Billionaires Build

#631

Post by jessaustin »

RestlessMind wrote: post #478
chillwaves wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither category should exist. The fact billionaires exist is an indictment against our system and how we allocate resources.

Not really. If someone designs a COVID vaccine tomorrow and decide to charge just 1$ for every person receiving that, I would not begrudge them becoming a billionaire when a billion people benefit from that vaccine. That is some real value created and delivered to the society.

I think probably there will be some costs associated with creating and manufacturing this vaccine...

Re: Billionaires Build

#632

Post by chillwaves »

ajmadesc wrote: post #460
chillwaves wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government, controlled by the people.

The problem is finding a way to implement a government controlled by the people. I respect the optimism though

It's a lot more difficult to do with billionaires around, especially the ones appointed to cabinet level positions in government.

Re: Billionaires Build

#633

Post by dang »

slumpt_ wrote: post #571
postingpals wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, as you know it's a contentious issue and we get tired of repeating the same information. Then again, I'm sure you get tired of repeating yourself too.

Sometimes snarky dismissals are appropriate. Trying to hold everything to some academic standard of discourse is implausible when we have deliberate bad actors pushing disingenuous arguments that - by this standard - must be repetitively exhaustively deconstructed time and time again. Expecting that is how you convince a large subset of folks to never bother with said deconstruction, and ultimately let bad ideas roam…

Actually snark works quite a bit better in academic discourse, where the communities are smaller and more cohesive. It doesn't work well in large, open internet forums like this one, where it basically just triggers an avalanche of tedious and ever-worse behavior. I'm not making a moral point—rather an empirical one about this particular type of internet environment. Here's a related explanation from a few weeks ago if anyone cares: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25130956

In a context like this, snark doesn't encourage people to "go do their own research" or save "impressionable / gullibile minds", nor is that really what people care about. (If it were, they'd expend energy doing those things in a way that might actually work.) Rather, its function is to vent one's own frustrations by translating them into concentrated language. The effect this has on community is to pollute it with fumes.

This is destructive of the ecosystem, unless one is happy with a single species, the snark, consuming all the others. Therefore we all need to find better ways of self-regulating and containing our frustrations. Then we can address other people in a way that has a chance of connecting with them.

Re: Billionaires Build

#634

Post by kevas »

criddell wrote: post #410
kevas wrote: post #312

About to write some possibly controversial stuff... My early life, I grew up and had middle to upper middle class all around me. In my late teens and early twenties, there were times I had to scrounge my cushions and rummage through my car to find enough change to eat a meal. We live in a society where everyone has access to a computer—personal or local library. We have all the information we need to bring (the major…

> It’s my belief that it boils down to a few things: - self learning - dedication And luck especially with respect to your health and the health of those around you. It's harder to invest in yourself when you are a primary caregiver to a relative. It's this argument that makes me wonder how anybody can be opposed to some form of universal health care. I heard somebody ask this question once and it's stuck with me: ho…

That’s why I didn’t write everyone. For the people that have those type of scenarios, that’s just horrible and society, if possible should help.

Re: Billionaires Build

#635

Post by imgabe »

arrosenberg wrote: post #623
imgabe wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is it going to be worse if Jeff Bezos is worth $50,000,000,000 instead of $180,000,000,000? Hmm, how would it be if Amazon stock dropped in price by 73%? Actually, I think that would be pretty bad. Ironically, least of all for Jeff Bezos. How good would it be for you if your 401k dropped by that much? Or maybe you're thinking we could just confiscate the stock, or force him to sell it. Sell it to whom? Other bi…

I'd be fine, I'm not that rich. I'm also not that heavily invested in Amazon, so I'd be even more fine. Again, how will things be worse if Jeff Bezos was worth $50,000,000,000 instead of $180,000,000,000? That's what was supposed - that it would make things worse if we made him pay a fair rate to the American people for helping maintain his wealth.

Jeff Bezos does not exist in a vacuum. There is no world in which you reduce Bezos' net worth by that much without affecting the rest of the economy. I already mentioned a couple possible effects. I'm sure there are many others including ones that nobody will think of until after they happen.

I also don't see how you talk about fair while proposing to enact a special tax to target one specific individual. That seems more like a personal vendetta than an economic policy.

Re: Billionaires Build

#636

Post by dang »

postingpals wrote: post #479
dang wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't post snarky dismissals to HN. If you know more than others, the best way to respond is to share some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn. If you don't want to do that or don't have time, that's fine, but in that case please don't post. Letting the internet be wrong about everything is the primary survival skill we all have to work on anyhow. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=t…

Sorry, as you know it's a contentious issue and we get tired of repeating the same information. Then again, I'm sure you get tired of repeating yourself too.

That's certainly the case. But the internet is basically stateless. No matter how many times you've explained something in the past, statistically speaking you're always talking to an audience who's never heard it before. Since it's neither nice nor effective to punish people for that by venting one's frustrations at them, the only thing that really works is to patiently repeat oneself and manage the frustration internally.

Re: Billionaires Build

#637

Post by wyre »

jskajakzkjx wrote: post #614
tshaddox wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know, many some more of the value of those assets could go to the workers who created the value.

Who’s going to invest the capital and do the work to run a company that develops technology (eg. hiring the tens of thousands of people required to fabricate 5 nm chips and build cell phones) if there is no way to become a billionaire off of it? I figure the people who are capable of that kind of stuff would put all their efforts toward overthrowing the system instead if that’s what the rules were.

I thought the reason for the advancement for science and technology was for the betterment of humankind and not dreams of becoming a billionaire.

Re: Billionaires Build

#638

Post by asciimov »

kevas wrote: post #312

About to write some possibly controversial stuff... My early life, I grew up and had middle to upper middle class all around me. In my late teens and early twenties, there were times I had to scrounge my cushions and rummage through my car to find enough change to eat a meal. We live in a society where everyone has access to a computer—personal or local library. We have all the information we need to bring (the major…

> It’s my belief that it boils down to a few things: - self learning - dedication

Opportunity is the biggest differentiator among the rich and poor.

Intelligence is fairly evenly distributed in our society, being poor doesn't mean you are dumb and lazy it means that you haven't had all the opportunities that a rich person has.

These opportunities are from simple things like individual tutoring, vacations and time to relax, to being able to fly across country to take an unpaid/underpaid internship, to having mentors. It also means more complex opportunities like living in better areas with a greater chance to meet like minded people and having better/more dumb luck.

Opportunities among the poor aren't equal either. A rural poor kid has less access to things than the equally poor kid that lives in the big city. These things include industry outreach, better libraries, museums, concerts, better schools, all around greater access.

Rather focusing solely on educating and motivating a populous, we should also be figuring out how to provide better opportunities for our citizens. Instead of H1-B's we might be better off forcing companies to hire kids that didn't go to a small select number of schools, or to hire people from middle America, or just incentivize them to hire and train Americans.

Further we could expand our broadband infrastructure, provide a computer and internet to every person in America who doesn't have access to neither.

Re: Billionaires Build

#639

Post by themacguffinman »

chillwaves wrote: post #255
api wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who would allocate resources better?

The government, controlled by the people.

If the government or any similar bureaucracy could actually allocate resources better, we wouldn't have so many failed planned economies and not a single successful example compared to capitalist economies.

Re: Billionaires Build

#640

Post by nazgulnarsil »

drewrv wrote: post #235

This essay uses a weak straw-man: the only way to become a billionaire is by exploiting people I think the "principle of charity" or "steel-man" criticism of billionaires isn't that every single billionaire is directly exploiting people. It would be closer to something like this: The problem is that our society has feedback loops that make it hard to escape poverty, and feedback loops that let the wealthy amass more…

PSA that the bottom 50% of taxpayers pay 3% of the taxes. Net negative once you consider all the frictional costs.
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